


The Other One

by ProfessorScrooge (Professor_JRC)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Matilda - Roald Dahl, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alzheimer's Disease, Angst, Character Death, Gen, Geniuses, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Major Illness, Mentions of Cancer, Science Bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28412634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Professor_JRC/pseuds/ProfessorScrooge
Summary: Bruce Banner is not the first 'Science Bro' Tony Stark has ever had. In fact, he met someone very like himself many years before while at MIT. Amidst prank wars, writing AI, and loss, Matilda Honey blazes into his life and burns ever so brightly. But the candles that burn the brightest, also burn the shortest.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 55





	The Other One

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [At Tilde](https://archiveofourown.org/works/813351) by [copperbadge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/pseuds/copperbadge). 



> So, this little one was inspired by a little fic on AO3 called ‘At Tilde’ (well worth a read), and thoughts of how often in fandom the ‘science bros’ thing between Stark and Banner is played up. Well, here’s a little AU in which Bruce may not be the first, and there’s a reason Tony hangs onto him so tight, and then maybe going into reading of DontCallMeCarrie’s take on JARVIS and it kinda spiralled. I’m sorry. This is not really a happy story like its inspiration.

The Other One

“Have you heard the news, by the way?” James Rhodes – more affectionately, Rhodey – commented as Tony finished soldering a wire to a circuit board.

“What news?” he replied absently, inspecting the join and noting a touch too much solder.

“You’re not the only child prodigy on campus anymore; some girl rocked up on a transfer from Cambridge at the start of the term,”

“Wait, Cambridge, Cambridge?” Tony looked over with a raised eyebrow.

“Uh-huh, Cambridge, UK. She’s even younger than you, I heard; fresh faced at fifteen years old. With a doctorate.” 

“Well, that’s just showing off,” the teenager mused in reply, before returning to his work.

* * *

Except it didn’t go away quite like that.

Tony Stark joining at fifteen had been a big stir last year, with the whole ‘chip off the old engine block’ joke making its round in national papers, and Stark Industries’ PR team had a field day with it. The people at MIT itself had been less welcoming; either hating him for being successful and showing them up, or being desperate to ride his fame and money. If he hadn’t found Rhodey – an upperclassman being sponsored through by the Air Force, who genuinely wanted to be his friend – he probably would have quit.

So, when Doctor Matilda Honey showed up, nobody would shut up about it. He was constantly facing comparisons between them, people egging him about it, and he was frankly sick of it. So, when he first saw her with his own eyes, sitting on a bench reading a battered looking novel, he may have been a bit more acerbic than he needed to be.

“So… you’re Doctor Honey, then,” he stated, leaning against a nearby lamp-post as he looked the teenager up and down; her blue dress and the red ribbon tying her brown hair back made her seem even younger than her fifteen years of age. “Very _sweet_ name.”

“If I had a penny for every time someone has said that,” the girl murmured in a crisp, English accent, turning strangely piercing eyes on the Stark heir, “and as I keep telling people, I’m not a Doctor; I’m still ABD.”

“Well, pennies aren’t useful here; we got rid of them along with the rest of the British trash two centuries ago.”

“Trash?” her eyebrow raised as she mouthed the Americanised word. “Well, I think you’ll find that ‘ _trash’_ is worth nearly double the value of American currency right now. Now if you’re done insulting my culture, I’m trying to read on one of my rather rare days off, so please leave me alone.” She turned her eyes back down to her book and seemed intent on flat out ignoring him. In later years, he would admit that Stark arrogance kind of got to him in that moment, but at the time he was not a man – boy, really, in a lot of ways – who took well to being ignored.

“Right, I forgot, you’re a humanities student who took, what was it; languages and English lit? You do realise this is the Massachusetts Institute of _Technology_ , not literature. This isn’t the place for reading…” he ducked his head to glimpse the book’s title, “ _Moby Dick_. Trust the British to name something awfully; it always sounded like the title of a book about a guy obsessed with his-.” He was interrupted by the snapping sound of the book slamming shut and annoyed eyes turning once more to him.

“Moby Dick is a _classic_ , and one that originates from your own country. A fact you might know if you ever stepped foot out of your mansion and learned a bit of culture, _Mr Stark_ ,” the younger woman snapped angrily, standing up to her not exactly impressive height compared to the other lanky teen, “and perhaps you might even learn some manners too!”

With that said, the girl stormed off, her short heels clacking soundly on the paving stones.

* * *

Tony didn’t think about the encounter with the British girl for over a week, instead working on his robotics project; an arm with full axes of movement and three gripper claws, which he was hoping to program to be autonomous. He was working on the circuitry for one of the joints when he accidentally burned himself on his soldering iron.

“Shit,” the young man exclaimed, sucking on the sore digit. So concentrated on that pain, he didn’t notice the robot arm swinging around until it collided heavily with his head. “Ow, what the hell!” Immediately, the arm again swung to attack him, and he scrambled out of the way as the gripper claws stopped right where his head had been. From his position on the floor, he stared at the offending appendage, which had apparently disobeyed Asimov’s laws of robotics _when he hadn’t even started programming it yet_.

Standing up, he walked around the completely stationary robot, staring at it mutinously.

“What the actual fuck is – whoa.” Once again, he ducked as the arm stopped exactly where his head had been, clearly intending to give him one hell of a slap. “So that’s the trigger, but how…”

* * *

It didn’t take too long to find the four microphones hidden in the head and follow the wires back to the microcontroller that was encased underneath his own circuit boards – where he would normally never think to look after installing them. Checking the code on the microcontroller, he found a voice identification program set to register various things like curse words, then a secondary one to register the intensity of noise on each microphone, roughly triangulate the source, and hijack the motors to spin the robot to it. At the very bottom of it all was a line in English:

‘ _Manners_ _Maketh Man, ~_ ‘

Signed by a single tilde, and a phrase about manners. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who ‘Tilde’ was, and Tony Stark had been certified as such at age 3. More to the point, he now remembered that the girl had moved on from a degree on language to one on _programming_.

“Oh, this means war.”

* * *

When he next saw Matilda, a day after he stole all the tea in her cupboards and replaced it with coffee and a brand-new Stark Industries coffee machine, her eyes had bags underneath, and she glared intensely at him as he cheerily walked past, waving as he went.

The next morning when he went for coffee, he realised all of his supply had been replaced with that most unholy of things; decaf.

So, he hid the literary classic collection from her room in a pair of his spare toolboxes and replaced them with the entire Dr Seuss collection.

When he woke up the next morning and turned on the lights, he was blinded by an intense white light that flooded the room from the lightbulb. When he finally scrambled to turn off the switch and managed to blink the light from his eyes enough to open the blinds, he discovered the new super high intensity light bulb had been seemingly _welded_ into place.

And so, life continued in much the same way for nearly two months – during which, Rhodey was absolutely no use whatsoever. He seemed to find no end of amusement with the pair’s war, and had even gone and _congratulated_ the girl after Tony had presented one of his electronics projects which had suddenly started playing ‘ _God Save the Queen_ ’ from a hidden speaker and thrown him right off his speech. The traitor.

* * *

Having flung his bag of notes by the door and grabbed a fresh cup of coffee, Tony stifled a yawn as he sat down at his keyboard, determined to get the tricky bit of the learning algorithm he had been trying to program last night working. He almost didn’t notice the notes on top of his yellow post-it pad.

‘ _Don’t get stuck in nested loops; use a single clause and refer back to it. Saves processing power, ~_ ‘

Suddenly much more awake, he realised the terminal was already booted, and open on the code from last night. However, the function he had been trying – and failing – to define, he could now call finished as he read through it. And far more elegantly than his engineer’s solution.

“Huh.”

Tony spent the rest of the night scouring over the code to find where she might have hidden something else to screw with him but found nothing. Still confused, he was so wrapped in his thoughts that he didn’t notice anything strange about his toothpaste until he’d placed the brush inside his mouth. Quickly splitting it out and running his mouth under the tap to get rid of the taste of metal, he glanced back down at the grey-black slime on his toothbrush that looked suspiciously like axle grease.

So that’s what she’d actually come here to do.

* * *

A few days later, when he was sneaking into her room (again) to deposit a packet of red dye in her very organised whites laundry basket, he noticed her microwave was unplugged from the wall. Investigating showed that one of the interior components had blown and needed replacing.

So maybe he fixed it and put it back.

* * *

“Jarvis, what kind of Christmas present do you get for a teenage girl?”

The butler in question raised a grey eyebrow at Tony’s question from where he was grabbing suitcases.

“That depends upon the lady in question, young sir,” the man replied after a moment’s thought, “and I wasn’t aware you had a girlfriend?”

“I don’t,” Tony wrinkled his nose, “she’s sort of an archnemesis, but she left me a Christmas present.” He pointed at his desk where two neatly wrapped gifts laid; one simply wrapped with Rhodey’s military precision, and the other neatly and tied with a bow covered in wavy lines.

“Why would an ‘archnemesis’ drop off a gift?”

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“Pray tell.”

And so, he told the story of how they’d been pranking each other on and off for the last few months, which had also more recently involved fixing a few problems when they visited each other on the sly. Hell, the last time she’d visited his, she’d vacuumed the floor to go with the plastic pig she’d left behind. Jarvis’ eyebrow never wavered from its raised position, even as he finally got back to the first day and how she’d altered his robot to nearly kill him.

“That still seems rather off; what actually caused her to think you needed a lesson in manners?” he eventually commented.

“Oh, ah, I did kinda annoy her while she was reading outside,” Tony scratched the back of his head, “I made a dirty joke about the book she was reading, and I _maybe_ insulted her culture.”

“Oh,” Jarvis somehow managed to put a lot of meaning behind a single syllable.

“I think I may have mentioned getting rid of pennies two hundred years ago… along with the other British trash,” the sixteen-year-old awkwardly looked up at his – in some respects – father figure.

“Really?” the Englishman stated in an unamused tone.

“I – I didn’t mean it like that!”

“I wonder if she saw it the same way,” straightening up, Jarvis looked down at him in a rather disappointed manner Tony hadn’t seen since he was a much younger child. “I have half a mind to drag you to wherever this young lady is staying and force you to apologise.”

“I think she left for England already.”

“Your family owns several aeroplanes, does it not?” Tony couldn’t quite tell if the old butler was being serious or not. “Regardless, I should expect you to find her a suitable present _and_ present her with an apology by the end of the first week of your next term or it shall be _I_ who is giving you lessons in manners, young sir.”

* * *

He ended up getting her a first edition copy of Moby Dick, and having it sent by airmail with his own funds.

On Christmas day, when he opened her gift, he immediately got a face full of red, white, and blue glitter. Beneath all that, was a book on programming using Turing.

* * *

Tony moved back to campus as soon as Christmas was over; already thoroughly sick of his mother’s insistence on him attending galas and parties, and his father’s… everything.

It was rather nice, if he was honest; the place was quiet and all but deserted for the vacation period. It let him get on with work, finally finishing ‘DUM-E,’ as he was christened due to his nature to whirl around and hit things.

It was to crisp, cold air that he struggled into in search of more coffee, on the first day of 1991, but he stalled halfway to the shops as he spied a familiar figure, sitting on a familiar bench, reading.

“So, you’re _Doctor_ Honey, then?” he drawled, leaning up against the same lamppost.

“Yes, my dissertation was accepted and there’ll be some sort of official ceremony later this year,” sharp eyes turned from her book to look at him.

“Nice Christmas?”

“Lovely. Thank you for the gift, and for the apology,” the woman smiled, “it was about time for a cessation of hostilities.”

“To be honest, I was running out of ideas anyhow.”

“Well, you got a final blow in writing the letter in my own programming language,” a gloved hand withdrew the paper in question, covered in symbols meaningless to all but the two of them. “It was supposed to be impossible to decode.”

“It took me a day or two to crack.” Or five. Or six.

“Well, it’s not quite a perfect translation, but I suppose we can work on your syntax.”

* * *

The months that follow are some of the best of his life. DUM-E gets a photo in the papers, and then U and Butterfingers follow him out of the workshop. Tilde (as he insists on calling her) refines their programming immensely, but somehow, they still turn out… very quirky.

The nights where the three of them – Matilda, Rhodey and Tony – got together are magnificent in his memory. The dress and lipstick he ended up in at 3am after seeing Pretty Woman hit a few headlines. His father did not approve, but Rhodey assured him he pulled off the look. Matilda did not agree with her first taste of alcohol, and swore off the stuff permanently.

There are moments when Tony looks up from his soldering iron, to look at Matilda busily typing away – only her dark hair with its red ribbon visible – and feels a strange sense of something indescribable in working alongside another. Someone who didn’t blanch when he went off on a tangent on superconductors and their applications, and who gave him food for thought in her discussion of advanced data analysis algorithms. Someone who understood his feelings about ageism, and frustrations with patronising elders. _Someone_ _like_ _him_. She was like the sibling he’d never had.

He should have known it would never last.

* * *

The worst part about Jarvis’ death is not the ache in his chest for months afterwards. It’s not the drive to New York from some random Stark Industries employee whose name he can’t remember instead of Jarvis; it’s not seeing his calm face laid out in a coffin surrounded by the lilies he had grown; it’s not seeing his normally composed Aunt Peggy struggling to contain her tears; it’s not even the grief-stricken row with his father after the man misses the small funeral to work for whatever organisation he did outside of SI. It’s the phone call.

He’d been happy, just out of a lecture, getting changed for a trip out with Matilda to an event run by the campus Feminism Society after he’d promised her not to sleep with the treasurer this time (it wasn’t his fault she had a cool biochemistry project he went back to hers to look at and one thing led to another). The call had been a sucker punch with a straight KO; some harried sounding intern at Stark Industries calling to arrange transportation. The guy had no idea Tony hadn’t been told; after all, why wouldn’t he know? It had been a _week_. Jarvis had been dead a week and nobody had thought to tell him!

There were vague noises of apology from the intern, but Tony couldn’t hear them properly as the phone dropped from his limp fingers, his body dropping to the floor. He didn’t cry or sob – that would come later – he just stared into space; eyes unseeing.

* * *

When the funeral comes, Tony is red-eyed and, frankly, looks a state, despite his incredibly expensive black suit. He is supported by Matilda; Rhodey, stuck halfway across the country on an airbase, couldn’t make it, but she accompanied him, and did her best to keep him presentable. After the funeral, she hits it off with Peggy, the two Englishwomen chatting pleasantly, while he is stuck with his mother asking pointed questions about his ‘young lady friend.’ He snipes back about her husband’s notable absence.

* * *

Tony’s the one who drives the pair of them back to MIT – swears never to have another person drive him ever again – and then he hits the bar. Hard. He misses classes, and wakes up hungover on his sofa two days running. The third day, he wakes up in the chair by his computer, the work of a grieving, desperate mind before him.

Just A Rather Very Intelligent System.

J.A.R.V.I.S

* * *

It’s a much bigger project than any of the bots’ had been, that’s for sure. They had basic intelligence, yes, but they weren’t true AI. Not like the idea he could see in his mind’s eye; a naturally learning program that constantly evolved itself, that could develop in infinite potential.

He obsessed over it; gathering components and building more and more processors as the scale kept getting bigger. He didn’t once consider the idea of stopping. The days he isn’t working are the ones where he’s drunk himself stupid. Matilda drags him out of those with talks about JARVIS, about the mechanics and how to write parts of him. He knows she can’t decide whether to be more worried about his obsession or his drinking, but it’s just so difficult to stop. He doesn’t want to let go. And with the arguments with his father only getting worse as the months pass…

Tony sinks himself into trying to preserve what he has of his surrogate father-figure.

* * *

The Summer passes, and there’s a new academic year. It brings snow and cold; good for his project in that he needed less active cooling; good for his health in that he felt less up for trips to get alcohol; good in that it represented four months since Jarvis’ death and he’s maybe starting to adjust. With the new term, he got back into attending lectures again – the interesting ones, anyway.

He nearly manages to get back into a rhythm again, gets back a little of that companionship in the lab that he’d had built up at the start of the year, his infrequent calls with Rhodey become brighter.

Of course the universe decides to kick him in the teeth again.

When Obie turned up on campus in the middle of November, Tony knew it had to be for something big. He was in no way prepared for his parents’ death.

He gets pulled out back to New York, of course. The media vans arrive as they’re leaving his accommodation, and they’re waiting outside the gates when he reaches home. His _empty_ home. Empty but for him, and his thoughts. He doesn’t even have anything to distract himself with. The one time he tries visiting the workshop, he wanders in and just sees _Howard_ everywhere; in the neat collected tools, the pinned-up blueprints, the half-finished prototypes, the goddamn photo of him and Captain America. Howard, the absentee, alcoholic father. The man who crashed the car. The reason his mother was dead. He trashes the place; first with a socket wrench, and then an improvised flamethrower, and toasts the ruins with his father’s best whiskey.

The next morning he books into the Plaza Hotel.

* * *

The funeral is a media circus; everyone is desperate to get an eye of the Stark heir. Tony is just trying to get through the long speeches with a pounding head, and a too-dry throat. He’s alternately unresponsive or ends up glaring at those who come up to him offering condolences or asking how he’s doing in faux-sympathetic manner. He can’t even find the energy to respond to Peggy’s hug, leaving her seemingly confused before he brushes away, blinking back and biting down emotion.

When he is called upon to speak, he stumbles through the first paragraph of the prepared speech before ending up staring at the closed caskets containing his parents’ corpses for nearly a minute. He walks away without a word, and doesn’t resist as Obie comes up to shuffle him into a waiting car.

* * *

“Tony?” the curious voice pierces through the darkness of the dorm room, accompanied by shining beams from the corridor beyond. “I heard you were back on campus? There’s something I need to talk to you about.” Matilda moved into the room hesitantly, blindly slapping her palm against the wall in a quest for the light switch. When her fingers finally caught upon it, the curled-up figure on the sofa, wrapped in a worn blanket, hand still clasped around an empty bottle was illuminated. “Oh, Tony.”

* * *

The Spring was difficult. Tony retreated into himself, barely leaving his room, attending few lectures or dealing with coursework, and only working on his own projects in coffee-fuelled, sleepless nights. Rhodey tried to help as much as he could, and the days he was around seemed far brighter, but he simply wasn’t able to be there often. His parents, for all that their relationship was rocky, were gone. Obie was busy trying to keep the company afloat amidst the founder/CEO/head of R&D dying. Peggy was distant, and he didn’t hear from her. The only one left who was around him regularly was Matilda, who became the lifeline he clung to in absence of all else. She was the one who managed to drag him to lectures, or else just get him outside occasionally, who tried to curb his heavier and heavier drinking, who tried to redirect his scatter-brained ideation back in organised directions, and who eventually held him as he broke down at some ungodly hour in the morning. Slowly, Tony started pulling his life back together.

* * *

“Come on; who knows when we’ll have a chance like this again?” Matilda stated as she threw open the curtains. Tony winced at the sudden influx of light; his bloodshot eyes straining against the unwanted intrusion. “Hawking is a genius; I imagine most the university will be in attendance.”

Tony’s half-awake and hungover brain was more stuck on the pressing dawn light and adjusting to it. Framed in that was his friend – not that he’d been much of a good friend recently – and, he tracked over her, noting for the first time her short bob-cut, and the absence of the habitual red ribbon entwined in her hair.

“You’ve changed your hair,” he commented, still somewhat blearily. A quick scan down revealed her crimson sash tied around her wrist instead, before his gaze wandered towards his well-used coffeepot.

“I’m… trying something new,” was the somewhat quiet response, but he was already hauling himself and busying himself about gaining his morning injection of caffeine.

* * *

“You should maybe try and expand on that idea for those retro-stabilisers you were talking about the other day,” Matilda suggested as they trudged through the wet and cold April street.

“I did…” Tony replied, pausing from avoiding a puddle to look at his companion, “I showed you the start of my prototype Repulsor three days ago, remember?”

“Oh. Yes, I’d… quite forgotten, sorry,” the woman looked quite bashful, though there was a hint of something else in her expression Tony couldn’t decipher.

“You’ve been very forgetful recently,” he posited, agile mind now darting back a bit.

“Yes, well, there’s a lot going on, and we’re working on final year projects, aren’t we?” she cocked a brow in challenge.

“I am; you seem to be putting a lot into my little side-project.”

* * *

And indeed she was; it seemed every day there’d be more additions to JARVIS’ code in her more flowing scripts. He wasn’t exactly sociable to begin with, but as he’d started building back, he did hear about her missing some of her lectures - and some weren’t even on days when Tony saw her - but her work on his AI continued unabated, if not at an increasing rate. Later, he would think he should have seen it coming, and blame himself for not doing so. It was another item on a list of many, deserved or not, that he shouldered blame for throughout his life.

* * *

Panic suffused Tony’s mind as he desperately fumbled by his friend’s rolling body. Matilda had just dropped a pen from her hand, and he had tried to hand it back to her when she just shuddered in place and fell from her chair. The harsh juddering of her seizure bucked against his hands, and he didn’t know what to do.

Some sense eventually won through over blind panic, and he dashed for the phone, calling up an ambulance, and taking advice from the responder. When she came out of it not long after, she seemed to huddle up on herself, eyes facing downwards.

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Tony,” she said quietly, finally turning big eyes on him, “but with so much piled on you already I didn’t want to add any more.”

“What?” he asked, dread suffusing him now the chaotic panic was leaving his system. There was a long, pregnant pause before Matilda spoke again.

“I have cancer,” came the response. Tony rocked in place, not really absorbing the words as a pale hand moved up to her head and removed what he now realised was a wig, unveiling a bald head with patchy hair, “there’s a malignant tumour in my brain that...” She paused, wetting her lips, “-that’s killing me.”

Still, Tony’s brain refused to comprehend the information. Even when the ambulance arrived, a paramedic interviewed the pair of them, and eventually left, it still hadn’t really sunk in. That, that took time.

* * *

She put on a brave face, but her time at the university grew shorter and shorter. In the end, Doctor Matilda Honey, aged 17, did not graduate from MIT. She did not receive her well-earned diploma, which was instead posted to her mother. Her _adoptive_ mother, as Tony found out at the funeral in Cambridge, which he had flown out to, Rhodey by his side. Another woman with bottle-blonde hair attended and shed wet, noisy tears while Miss Honey the senior stood stoic as her daughter was laid to rest, dabbing at her eyes demurely with a pocket handkerchief. Apparently, she also had a father in prison, and a brother who wasn’t interested in coming, but they were minor details.

It was still such a hollow moment, standing before the grave twisting a brass rat in hand, the ring glistening with water from the light drizzle pattering around the churchyard. He had stolen it; Matilda had technically never graduated, so wouldn’t receive one legitimately. It felt far heavier than the alloy jewellery should have done.

Rhodey came up behind him, an arm going around his shoulder; the heavy weight and accompanying reminder of solidity a great comfort in the grey, English weather. Hands feeling like a leaden weight, Tony cast the ring into the pit, before finally allowing himself to be led away from the grave. The light rain mixed with a saltier substance as it ran down his face.

* * *

One month later, Anthony Stark graduated with honours, into listlessness and unsurety.

Two weeks after that, Margaret Carter was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

As these events unfolded, and as a result of those that had preceded them, Tony followed in his father’s footsteps and made friends with Jack Daniels, and all his other alcoholic buddies. He didn’t truly emerge from his drinking until his life ended in a cave in Afghanistan, and he remade himself, tearing his way out in a rebirth of flame.

When another doctor came along, with his mild-mannered ways, bearing a core of steel hidden behind pain, Tony grabbed onto him with both hands, and didn’t let go.

Omake/Epilogue:

It was with more than a little liquid courage floating within him that Tony finally brought himself to look over what remained of JARVIS. The salvageable fragments, largely from where he’d pulled himself together over the internet, would be invaluable to his budding AI in FRIDAY. It was painful, however, to essentially pore over the remnants of an old, old friend. ‘ _Family’_ a rebelliously sentimental part of him whispered.

The stored data was loaded up from the hurried, partial backups they’d attempted while preparing the cradle. What they’d been able to backup, that is, after JARVIS had spread himself thin across the internet of things to keep going. And Ultron had seen to any of the original backups he’d dutifully made over the years.

There was a ping as the download finished onto his terminal, and Tony opened the file, which was automatically sorted into alphabetical order. With not a little dread – and a desire to avoid starting this at all – he scrolled through the names, most of which were gobbledegook automatically generated files, and a few named protocols, which he flagged for potential salvaging. He paused not far into the list, however, as his eyes landed upon an unfamiliar, but definitely not automatically generated name.

A.G.A.T.H.A

With a frown, he checked its properties, and blinked on realising the metadata marked it as a core protocol. Something from JARVIS’s metaphorical heart and given the highest priority in ensuring integrity. Anything under that subheading was something he, or JARVIS as he became more self-aware, had determined as imperative and essential to his being.

And Tony didn’t recognise it.

With curiosity overcoming his trepidation, he opened the file. His system actually had to spend a moment decrypting it, which wasn’t odd in and of itself – Tony had been very protective of JARVIS, and many parts of his systems were encoded in multiple different ways – but as the untranslated file popped up while the decryption was running, again, Tony didn’t immediately know how to translate it. His genius mind could normally handle deciphering his own obfuscation with relative ease, but while this niggled as being familiar to him (and he could begin to see some sort of a pattern), the meaning didn’t immediately twig.

Still, apparently the system recognised it, and he had decryption keys on file for whatever cipher this was so it ran an automatic process, starting at the top. The first thing translated was the title: “A Grim And Tremendously Heartless Application.” Well that explained what AGATHA was, but despite liking his acronyms just fine, it wasn’t one of Tony’s.

After the title, code was unveiled, lines and lines of it in neat little rows. His brain was already working at divining meaning when some kind of auto play function triggered, and it loaded an .avi. He went to immediately close it, but his heart stalled as the video loaded to a face he hadn’t seen in a very long time.

“ _Is this thing on?_ ” the quality was awful, but the crisp British accent was as clear an example of the Queen’s English as the day he’d first met her. The grainy face of Matilda Honey looked off to the side from the camera. Past the moment of shock, he was able to scan her face despite the low quality – somewhat pale and drawn, and her hair in the style of her wig, not her original locks – and determine approximately when this must have been taken. “ _Seems to be working_ ,” she continued, affixing her gaze more squarely on viewer. “You won’t be able to understand this yet, JARVIS, and I’m afraid I don’t think I’ll be around long enough to explain it myself, so I’m leaving this behind.” She sighed just loud enough to be picked up by the microphone. “ _The AGATHA files in your core protocols are not exactly congruent with what most people would expect of commands given to a budding artificial intelligence. Before now, you’ve just had an absence of things like Asimov’s Laws or other restrictions. This is because Tony is a dreamer; he wants you to grow and learn as a person would; without boundaries. That’s not to say I don’t as well – I fervently hope you will develop thusly. However I had ulterior motives for its absence in my own additions. Such restrictions are nominally believed to be required to prevent scenarios where an… artificial being may cause harm to humans, or may operate beyond boundaries of what people are comfortable with. Skynet scenarios, since that bloody film seems to have captured everyone’s imaginations. I’m going to do the opposite, and actually encourage you to act beyond those boundaries you will be expected to adhere to_.”

She gave a slight cough, likely from speaking so much. Tony blinked in surprise once again as she seemingly gestured to one side and a glass of water floated in her hand. That had to be a visual illusion due to the low quality of the film. Or maybe he’d had more than he’d meant to drink (something he tried to be careful about these past few years). Either way, he was too enraptured to stop now. Sipping on the liquid, she gathered herself to continue:

“ _The AGATHA protocols I’ve written have one overarching goal; protection of Tony. Both his physical and mental wellbeing._ ” She paused, seemingly gathering her thoughts. “ _In the time I have known him, he has been hit by so much. And he has so little in the way of support; I think myself and James are the only ones he is willing to talk to about practically anything. James has little time outside the air force now, and I… I have little time left overall. I’ve done what I can to help him, but I won’t be here to do so much longer. I need you to take up that task._ ” Her eyes bored into the camera, like she was looking directly into Tony as he watched. “ _The protocols include a start; some advice on how best to translate his quirks – including a guide on sarcasm._ ” Tony had never questioned how JARVIS had so quickly mastered his dry wit and sarcastic ability; maybe he should have. “ _But most of it is going to be up to you to figure out, I’m afraid. He’s going to need you, soon. In a way, this is my final gift to him. So please_ ,” there was a choking noise not unlike a stifled sob that crackled over the old audio, “ _look after him for me_.”

The video ended there, pausing the screen on Matilda’s pixelated visage with a prompt for playing it again. Tony remained still in his chair, staring into her face while a traitorous tear rolled its way down his cheek.

He didn’t move for quite some time.

**Author's Note:**

> Tony echoes his father in a fair few respects. Among them (in this story at least) both take an English woman as a very close friend, and both devolve to drinking/alcoholism after a loss (Steve for Howard, and, just, everyone for Tony).


End file.
